How do I get the response from a image protocol request?

[glyh]

For now it looks like everything is going into stdin from kitty's output, but when I do something like

  echo -n "${TERM_ESC}_Gi=123,f=100,t=f,a=T;$path_encoded$TERM_ESC\\"
read -r > response

This doesn't work.

[kovidgoyal]

you cannot do this in shell script. Write a proper program and read the response from the terminal device.

[glyh]

What's preventing me from doing so? @kovidgoyal

[glyh]

Also is there an example in python or something?

[koterpillar]

zsh can read output character by character, which is probably not that efficient but good enough. Here is an example:

read_kitty_response() {
  # Read the string like:
  # <ESC>_Gi=31;error message or OK<ESC>\
  escapes=0
  response=""
  while [ $escapes -lt 2 ]
  do
    read -r -s -k nextchar
    if [ "$nextchar" = $'\e' ]
    then
      escapes=$((escapes + 1))
    else
      response="$response$nextchar"
    fi
  done
  read -r -s -k nextchar  # final backslash
  echo "$response"
}

# Replace with the desired Kitty command
echo -n "${TERM_ESC}_Gi=123,f=100,t=f,a=T;$path_encoded$TERM_ESC\\"

echo "Kitty response is: $(read_kitty_response)"

This works for me in zsh (it has -k for read); for bash try read -r -s -n 1 nextchar.